Category Archives: European Union

On 9th February 2016, Yanis Varoufakis, the unofficial leader of the ‘Democracy in Europe Movement 2025’, and a coalition of activists gathered together in Berlin to launch the ‘DiEM25’ manifesto. They declared: ‘The EU will be democratised. Or it will disintegrate!’

The former Greek finance minister believes the European Union to be a beautiful conception, but accuses it of opaqueness, elitism and furthering “the habitual domination of corporate power”.[1] Mr Varoufakis is right – at least to the extent that this is a widespread and growing feeling amongst citizens who feel alienated and disempowered across the fledgling European polity. DiEM25 warns that this growing stagnation in democratic legitimacy combined with the growing fragility of European societies faced with economic and technological upheaval and mass migration, is bringing the continent to a critical moment of peril.

“This is the unseen process by which Europe’s crisis is turning our peoples inwards, against each other, amplifying pre-existing jingoism, xenophobia”…“Committed democrats must resolve to act across Europe”.

The manifesto document is light on actual proposals. Those that are presented range from highly feasible reforms – live-streaming European Council meetings and publishing ECB and Eurogroup minutes – to the grander ambition of convening a European constitutional assembly by 2025. What DiEM25 does do is expose a divergence in the strategy of European unity dating back to the early federalists, a divergence that could ultimately prove to be a fatal flaw.

In 1941, at the height of the most recent and terrible of European civilization’s recurring descents into barbarity, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi languished on Mussolini’s prison island – Ventotene. Their internment for anti-Fascist dissent gave them the opportunity to reflect on the origins of totalitarianism and to ponder how best to return Europe to a lasting peace. Together they penned an extraordinary document: the Ventotene Manifesto[2] is an explicitly socialist statement of intent. It refers to the “revolutionary masses” and describes the landowning elites as “thoroughly parasitic”, but it nonetheless rejects the classism of Communist parties, arguing against the dictatorship of the proletariat as the historical means of emancipatory progress. Instead of class struggle they advocated for the ‘Movement for a Free and United Europe’. The greatest strength of Spinelli and Rossi was that they understood the imperative need for Demos. Like the DiEM25 manifesto, the Ventotene Manifesto proposed a constitutional assembly; they desired a federated Europe that was representative and participatory with enough power retained by the federal states to allow for “the development of a political life according to the particular characteristics of the people”. The weakness of Spinelli and Rossi is that they were too eager in anticipating what a free and united Europe could be and do, but treated as of secondary importance the institutional framework needed to construct such a political community. This may be an unfair criticism; they were after all stuck on an island with no knowledge of what the conditions at the end of the war would be. Nonetheless, they predicted that the united Europe would take many industries, particularly steel, into public ownership (some debates never die), whilst also remarking that “it would be superfluous to dwell at length on the constitutional institutions”. They presented a sweeping dream with little clarity of method.

This was not the case for Jean Monnet. In his Memoirs,[3] which should be required reading in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, he emphasised repeatedly: “I distrust general ideas, and I never let them lead me far away from practical things”. This is indicative of his approach to peace-building in Europe; patient wisdom, meticulous attention-to-detail and utilising a remarkable talent for networking. Over several decades, Monnet relentlessly cultivated friendships across Europe, reaching out to intellectuals, politicians, civil servants, businessman and trade unionists, who he convened together in the ‘Action Committee for the United States of Europe’. Despite their grandiose name, the group adopted the strategy of incremental development that can be identified in the contemporary EU: cautious (pre-Eurozone that is) economic integration starting with the strategic industries in the European Coal and Steel Community, treaty negotiations between member states, regulatory mechanisms, civil society and stakeholder engagement, and a gradually constructed institutional framework. These methods are familiar to students who have studied the Neo-Functionalism vs. Inter-Governmentalism debates in political science. They are the crucial difference in approach between the Ventotene Manifesto and that outlined by Monnet in Memoirs. The divergence between the Movement and the Committee. The Action Committee created an elite vanguard which has contributed incalculably to a stable peace in Western Europe…but a peace lacking a Demos. This is not to say that Monnet, Willy Brandt, Max Kohnstamm and the other associates were anti-democratic. Far from it. Monnet was enthusiastic about the United Kingdom because of our “respect for freedom, and the working of democratic institutions.”

Still a ‘democratic deficit’ in the EU has emerged and is not only a theoretical matter, but a real and harmful problem. It must be addressed, but not through Brexit. Nor through regionalist devolution alone. Both of these options risk impotency in an era of neoliberal globalisation. The deference of sovereign states to exterior institutional frameworks will become increasingly necessary in everything from the protection of marine habitats such as the humble seagrass[4], to transnational policing, adaption to mass migration flows and internet governance. Unlike ICANN, IMF, the World Bank and other international governance institutions, the EU has a Council whose members are elected heads of states or governments and an elected Parliament. Moreover, it has an institutional understanding of responsibility for fundamental rights afforded to citizens, grounded in common historical experiences, civilizational heritage and political freedom. This is not nothing; it is something that can be worked on. Democratising Europe will require the bold political imagination DiEM25 are calling for.

In Klaus Harpprecht’s 1995 biography of Thomas Mann, he highlights a statement which Mann wrote in 1947, which, as Harpprecht puts it, “one reads with a distinct shiver half a century later”:

In barely 50 years […] Germany will, in spite of everything, have all of non-Russian Europe in its pocket, as Hitler could already have if he had not been so impossible.

Less than 50 years later and the country was reunified, but it was a more restrained Germany on the European stage, deeply aware of its past and struggling to bear the economic burden of incorporating East Germany into the West German republic. Still, Mann was in many ways correct, for it is Germany’s financial might and its very deep resources which have so far kept the European integration bicycle pedaling forward. Yet as the recent negotiations over the third bailout of Greece illustrated, there are signs that Germany’s largesse and its willingness to sacrifice its own interests for the sake of the European project have definite limits.

Twenty-five years ago, everything seemed possible. “Do you realize that you are sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolf Hitler?” Chancellor Helmut Kohl said to an astonished Timothy Garton Ash shortly after re-unification. It was evident, said Ash, that as the first chancellor of a united Germany since Hitler, Kohl was profoundly conscious of his historical duty to do things differently.

Germany today is earnest in its desire to be a good European neighbor, but it does not believe that it can or should pay any cost as part of this role. One problem is that economic, not ethical values have become the lodestone of the European Union. As a hybrid construct, the EU lacks the societal dimension which, within the nation-state, is the critical element that allows one group of people to identify with another and which legitimize government actions designed to help one part of the community at the expense of another. People in London or New York accept, perhaps grudgingly, that their tax pounds and dollars may be used to fund projects for the benefit of people in Cardiff or New Orleans. They accept this because they recognize the others as being members of the same community.

Most liberal democratic states in the West succeed by having political and constitutional processes in place which legitimate policy choices that help one part of a society at the expense of another. Here, it is both the acceptance of the specific legitimation process by people (i.e. its constitutional and political processes) AND people’s recognition that they inhabit a common society that ultimately justifies taxation and spending decisions. As Keith Whittington of Princeton puts it, “constitutions cannot survive if they are too politically costly to maintain and they cannot survive if they are too distant from normal political concerns.”

This is a lesson which European, principally Franco-German leaders, often for the best of motives, have refused to take on board over decades. To understand their reluctance to consult with or seek to understand the opinion and belief of the people and the dilemma this has created for the EU, one must recognize the particular type of limited representative democracies which were established in Europe after the Second World War. If a constitutional system could bring the Nazis to power through a democratic election, as happened during the Weimar Republic, this was proof, especially to West Germany’s founders, that to prevent a country committing democratic suicide there had to be certain entrenched principles of democracy and of human rights that neither the people nor their representatives could change. At the state level these “highly constrained” democracies, as Jan Werner-Müller puts it, were characterized by unelected institutions (such as constitutional courts), while at the supra-national level European integration was meant to impose “further constraints on nation-state democracies through unelected institutions.”

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and faced with the prospect of a reunited Germany, French president François Mitterand sought to ensure that German reunification could only happen in parallel with the further integration of Europe, thereby binding Germany’s future to that of Europe. Mitterand told Germany’s foreign minister Genscher in November 1989 that if Germany did not commit itself to the European monetary union, “We will return to the world of 1913.” In Helmut Kohl, Mitterand had a partner who recognized that Germany would have to sacrifice its self-interest to reassure the rest of Europe. It was a policy, as Harold James put it, “derived not only from concern with foreign reactions to German power, and a French wish to harness Germany, but also from a German fear of German power.” This meant giving up the symbol of its post-war strength and stability – the Deutschmark – and committing the country to the European integration project by agreeing to monetary union (EMU). Closer union and EMU were the price that Germany had to pay to reassure its most important neighbor, France. In the heady days of German reunification the normative quest to be ‘the good neighbor’ in a new Europe had a special potency. But how much would Germany be willing to pay to play this role?

Those who criticize Germany for the ‘mental waterboarding‘ of Greece should recall the grumbling in the former West German states over the huge transfers of taxpayer wealth to the former East German states since reunification in 1990. Even today after approximately 2 trillion euros of investment in East Germany, German taxpayers still see a deduction on their paychecks for the so-called ‘Solidaritätszuschlag‘—the solidarity tax. If bailing out their own compatriots was done through clenched teeth, one immediately sees why additional money transfers to southern Europe to bail out Greece or other countries is for many Germans beyond the pale. Yet such fiscal transfers are seen by economists as the absolute pre-requisite necessary to make the eurozone work long-term.

The flaws in European monetary union that became so apparent at the start of the eurozone crisis in 2011 were to some commentators confirmation of just how ill thought-out it had been to allow different countries to share a currency without a political or fiscal union, and without any transfers of money from the stronger to weaker performing parts of Europe. Yet the flaws in monetary union were not just anticipated, but had been predicted from the outset. Far from being a project based on rosy expectations, those driving European integration embarked upon monetary union with the very belief that a crisis would develop at some point, since it was precisely through such challenges that the European cognoscenti in Paris, Bonn, and Brussels believed that closer political and fiscal union would develop. In a very prescient piece in Foreign Affairs from 1998, Timothy Garton Ash laid bare the delusion underlying the ‘crises will make Europe stronger’ fallacy: “It is a truly dialectical leap of faith to suggest that a crisis that exacerbates differences between European countries is the best way to unite them.”

Thinking Strategically, Thinking Morally

Supporters of the EU argue, often persuasively, that its success in promoting stability since World War Two can also be viewed as achieving a fundamentally moral purpose in preventing bloodshed and establishing the conditions in which societies might prosper and pursue policies that are both liberal democratic and ethical in nature. However, others like Robert Kagan have argued that Europe’s ability to operate and prosper in a post-modern utopia after 1945 was only possible because of the American-backed NATO security blanket which underwrote Europe’s capacity to pursue its liberal economic and social democratic policy desires, while safely being able to ignore thorny and usually scary geopolitical questions.

During the frantic negotiations over the Greek debt crisis in late June and July, the intervention by the U.S. government on behalf of Greece was noteworthy. The United States sees the geopolitical position of Greece between Europe and the Middle East as critical to the integrity of NATO’s south-eastern flank. Especially ironic was that it was the U.S., the citadel of free market capitalism and neoliberalism, that was having to remind social democratic European states about the risks of Greece crashing out of the eurozone due to a failure of European solidarity and compassion.

More problematic is whether most European leaders today are even capable of thinking strategically in geopolitical terms, given the dominant role of the U.S. in defending the continent during the Cold War. If thinking strategically can also involve acting (or appearing to act) morally, then the Marshall Plan after World War Two was certainly an example of how to turn bitter enemies into the staunchest of allies. It is far easier to turn so-called ‘solidarity’ into hostility or enmity, as eurozone leaders risk doing over Greece.

On one level, Angela Merkel is right to stress the importance of Europe getting its house in order to meet the economic and social challenges of the future. Her favorite statistic, as John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge note in their new book The Fourth Revolution, is that the European Union accounts for 7 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its GDP, and 50 percent of its social spending. Europe’s long-term crisis of a declining working age population and people living longer is indeed a serious one, and when the chancellor mentions this statistic, as she did at the World Economic Forum in 2013, it is intended every bit as much for a French audience as for any in southern Europe. The eurozone cannot work in the long-run unless France reforms its economy and introduces the same sort of efficient working practices as Germany, and increases its pension age further. Such French reforms seem unlikely at present, forcing Germany into the position of lobbying for institutions which will bring fiscal, budgetary, and, ultimately, political union closer, but knowing full well that such institutions will be impotent if France doesn’t or can’t play ball when it comes to enforcing rules. Germany, which agreed to monetary union to ameliorate French concerns over reunification, finds itself playing Oliver Hardy to the French Stan Laurel: “Here’s another fine mess you got us into.”

The conundrum which has thus far proved impossible for the EU (as it is currently constituted) to solve is that the bloodless grey institutions which might make Europe function effectively as an economic entity are likely to make it fail as a social democratic project. Reliance on economic orthodoxy at the expense of a set of values that European citizens could relate to has led to growing disenchantment with mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right across the EU. In their 2013 study “The ‘Bubbling Up’ of Subterranean Politics in Europe,” Mary Kaldor and Sabine Selchow found that those who have engaged in new forms of social mobilization and political activity across Europe have cited concern about the failure of democracy as the reason for the engagement and protest. The study found that Europe was ‘invisible’ in public displays of subterranean politics, and when it was visible it was generally regarded as part of the problem as much as part of the solution.

Part of the problem with the rationalist emphasis on process and rules is that the human dimension of Europe has got subsumed underneath the technocrat-heavy institutional architecture found in Brussels. As far back as 2005, well before the financial crisis and eurozone crisis hit, EU commissioner Joe Borg addressed the disconnect between the EU and its people: “As the European Union advances, it seems that we are losing the European citizen somewhere along the way.”

One issue is that until the 1990s, European citizens were rarely asked directly in the form of referenda whether they wanted the ‘ever closer union’ specified in the Treaty of Rome. Nevertheless, as Timothy Garton Ash notes, “for about 40 years, the project of European unification could rely on at least a passive consensus among most of Europe’s publics.” With memories of the Second World War still so vivid this was understandable. Equally compelling as a driver of European integration was the external threat posed by the Soviet Union, but when that began to dissipate in the late 1980s, and then German reunification became a reality, Europe had to discover a new raison d’etre for itself, and also find a way of incorporating a country the size of Germany (“too big for Europe, too small for the world” in Kissinger’s words) into a re-energized European integration project.

Reports of Europe’s Demise are Premature

European integration has revolved around firstly building an institutional framework for Europe, and then hoping that a European identity would develop in time alongside national identities. As former Polish foreign minister, Bronislaw Geremek observed, “Now that we have Europe, we need Europeans.” However, Rome wasn’t built in a day. As Walter Murphy observed, even 75 years after the establishment of the United States government, Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee still considered themselves citizens of their states first, of the South second, and of the “United States” last.

The European project, with all of its messy contradictions, is still better than any of the political alternatives. One need only look at some of the unappealing political figures (andPutin admirers) wanting the European Union to fail, such as Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Geert Wilders to recognize what a giant step back it would be economically and politically for Europe to return to a continent of feuding, self-interest, and parochial nationalism.

To find an antidote to these right-wing sirens of division and recrimination one need look no further than Eastern European countries such as Slovakia, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania—states that lived under the shadow of the Soviet Union, and now, Putin’s Russia. As important as NATO membership is to these countries, the values of the European Union are about more than pure economics. For many of these countries, the values of the EU also symbolize their own journeys towards liberal democracy. As one Polish politician put it to Gideon Rachman shortly before his country joined the EU: “Imagine there is a big river running through Europe. On one side is Moscow. On the other side is Brussels. We know which side of the river we need to be on.”

Issues like migration, terrorism, climate change, and drug trafficking cannot be effectively tackled by nation-states acting alone. The logical and practical reasons why everyone (except perhaps terrorists, drug smugglers, and Farage et al) should want the European project to succeed are manifest. Young people from every member state of the EU have benefited from the opportunities to work, study, and travel throughout Europe, often with the support of immensely successful cultural exchange schemes like Erasmus.

A more heartfelt attachment to the idea of Europe may still be some way off; but, as Robert Schuman put it in 1950, “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.”

The crisis of confidence in the EU since the eurozone crisis is more than simply a question of democracy, legitimacy, and allowing people more opportunities to participate in political processes. It also reflects a much more fundamental question about the type of society that people wish to live in, which, as we have seen with the independence movements in Scotland and Catalonia, is as much a challenge within states as for supra-state bodies like the EU.

The challenge for the European Union and its member states, particularly Germany, is in balancing the often incongruous demands of co-operation and self-interest, and thus demonstrate to their own citizens that concrete achievements can still create a Europe of solidarity and prosperity as Schuman envisaged.

David Miles is a Carnegie Scholar at the University of St Andrews researching the relationship between judicial review and majoritarianism within Anglo-American and German constitutionalism. He is an associate fellow at The Centre for Global Constitutionalism, and is managing editor of Global Politics Magazine.

The Weimar experience in the 1930s illustrates the extent to which liberal-democratic constitutional systems can be undone as a result of severe economic collapse that destroys people’s livelihoods. One question for anyone interested in constitutionalism is whether any constitutional system can be designed which can make a society immune (or at least less susceptible) to extreme political shifts, either to the left or right. Equally, can we regard a constitutional provision such as balanced budget amendment as a reasonable attempt to make a country live within its means, or is it, in fact, a policy choice which politicians in the here and now have no right to impose on future generations?

Weimar is burned into the German psyche for very obvious reasons, but have the wrong lessons been learned? For Germany today, the dangers of getting into debt illustrated by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the National Socialists was one reason for adding a balanced budget amendment to the Basic Law in 2009, which will become operative in 2016. The paradox, though, is that the anti-debt austerity medicine that Germany feels has worked for it, is causing severe socio-economic damage and political instability in southern European countries. When countries are being forced by other states to endure mass youth unemployment of around 50%, it is unsurprising that people will embrace more radical political options at home and see no value in an ever closer union within Europe.

What should a constitution do in times of extreme stress, and just as importantly, what should it not do? There ought to be enough flexibility in a system for governments to borrow money during a downturn to prevent it becoming a depression. Therefore, should a constitution which is intended to endure for generations to come bind those future generations and prevent them dealing adequately with the economic crises which will inevitably occur?

The concern is that the ‘fiscal constitution’ which Germany effectively imposed on southern Europe in 2011 in return for bailouts, and which it imposed on itself through the balanced budget amendment to the Basic Law, are causing huge deflation across Europe, and are preventing the countries in southern Europe from growing their way out of their debt predicament. The principle casualties so far have been centrist parties across the EU and particularly in southern Europe which have supported the fiscal straight-jacket approach favoured by Berlin.

Professor Keith Whittington of Princeton noted that “constitutions cannot survive if they are too politically costly to maintain and they cannot survive if they are too distant from normal political concerns.” (2007, p.26) For the countries and peoples of the eurozone, the constitutions which have to be maintained are not simply their own domestic ones, but the commitments arising from EU treaties and EU law.

A crunch is undoubtedly coming with respect to Greece and possibly some of the other indebted countries of Southern Europe which may well determine whether the benefits of remaining within the eurozone are worth the pain and political instability of maintaining Europe’s political and fiscal constitution. It may well be the case that Germany will blink first and do a deal to keep Greece in the eurozone to prevent the unpredictable consequences of a Greek default and exit which, as Barry Eichengreen notes, “would be Lehman Brothers squared” in terms of its likely effects on European and global financial stability. At that point money will likely flood out of all the banks of southern Europe, probably to the perceived safety of German and even UK banks. We’d then be back to the worst moments of the 2008 financial crisis.

This is where it is hard to see the logic of fiscal straight-jackets, whether they are imposed on southern Europe by Germany in exchange for bailouts, or by Germany upon itself through a balanced budget amendment. Germany is understandably wary of the dangers of debt because of its own history. However, Berlin’s ‘fiscal constitution’ is driving the PIGS states towards the exit and the eurozone towards a brick wall which may endanger the entire European project. Then, the political and economic cost of maintaining even the most well designed constitutions may just become too high.

David Miles is a Carnegie Scholar researching Anglo-American and German constitutionalism and is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Global Constitutionalism. He is also Managing Editor of Global Politics Magazine and is a contributor for the Scotsman, the Daily Beast and Huffington Post.

References:

Whittington, K, The Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.